I have a Western Digital eSATA external HDD and have been trying to get it to work with a Medion laptop running Vista Home Premium. No luck whatsoever. Is it likely to be a Windows driver issue, or just an incompatibility with the laptop?

4 Answers
4

eSATA works on Vista for the most part. The problem comes when you want to remove the device; the nForce Vista x86 driver (circa 2007) would bluescreen when you removed the drive. Not sure if this is still the case now. Microsoft SATA drivers support removal with a registry fix, KB950186 and also KB961078.

It doesn't show up in drive manager. I know it is formatted because I can access it from another PC via USB. Interestingly I can't reliably access it via USB on the laptop either.
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Anthony KAug 20 '09 at 8:11

It might be worth having a look in device manager to check that there are no unknown devices. I'm just wondering if the esata port is on a different controller that hasn't got drivers.
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ColAug 20 '09 at 9:39